Liberal plan to ‘reinvent’ party appears to be in disarray

A delegate passes between two signs on day one of the Liberal Party's biennial convention in Montreal.

Photograph by: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
, Postmedia News

MONTREAL — Going into this convention, the grand strategic objective of the Liberal party, it was commonly supposed, was to peel off disaffected centre-right voters from the governing Conservatives. Populist rhetoric to the contrary, the Liberals would reassure these voters with the promise of more of the same on the economy, but with a more appealing face, literally and figuratively.

The immediate task of the convention was to build out from Justin Trudeau’s personal rapport with the public, addressing doubts about his substance and abilities by surrounding him with meaty ideas on policy and a team of star candidates to implement them.

A couple of days into the event, it would appear the strategy, if that is what it was, is in some disarray. Justin Trudeau’s over-egged attempt, in his opening-night speech, to blame the Quebec “values” charter on the state of the economy; a raft of meddlesome, expensive or just plain silly policy resolutions; and the determination of one particular star candidate, Andrew Leslie, to walk onto the nearest Tory landmine have all combined to leave an impression that is anything but reassuring.

This is not a “new” or “reinvented” Liberal party; it is not even the centrist party of recent memory. From the evidence of the convention, it is an almost parodically left-wing party, and even if, as expected, the leader ignores most of the members’ handiwork in drafting the platform, what has been coming out of his own mouth is not hugely dissimilar: a difference more of degree than direction.

Trudeau’s economic thinking has been emerging in stages. Some of it has been encouraging — the openness to foreign investment in the oilpatch, for example. But more of it has been of the windy “struggling middle class” variety, a policy-light and almost entirely fact-free account of recent economic developments.

Thursday night, once again reaching for a profundity that often eludes him, the Liberal leader attempted to yoke his standard economic message — the middle class that “hasn’t had a pay raise in 30 years” — to the more traditional Liberal theme of “unity through diversity.” Having spoken forcefully, even movingly, against the Parti Quebecois’ divisive and xenophobic charter, he had rather less success in blaming its popular appeal on the allegedly depressed state of the economy.

There are two problems with this. One, it’s simply not true that the middle class is in such dire circumstances as Trudeau claims. Real wages are at record levels; family incomes have been rising for the better part of two decades; average net worth, for all the talk of household debt levels, is also at an all-time high. And two, there’s no evidence to suggest that Quebecers’ support for the values charter has anything to do with the economy, as opposed to the longstanding cultural insecurities of its francophone majority.

Still, it provides Trudeau with an additional argument for what is shaping up to be a remarkably expansionist agenda — not only as a matter of “growth,” but as a national unity strategy. Talking of national strategies: if the Liberal leader is short of ideas for spending vast amounts of public funds, the party has plenty more. Dozens, in fact.

A small sample of the resolutions before the convention (almost all of those proposed to date have passed) would include: a National Transportation Strategy, a National Energy Strategy, a National Grid Strategy, a National Manufacturing Strategy, several National Strategies for Childhood Development, a National Framework for Mental Health, a National Action Plan on Disability, a National Water Policy, a National Pharmacare Program, a National Youth Jobs Strategy, a Science-based Innovation Strategy and a Transformative Canadian Infrastructure Investment Plan. This last was undersigned by the Liberal caucus, which means Trudeau, and leaves no doubt that it would entail a great deal of additional public borrowing: One per cent of GDP, or $20 billion a year.

There’s more where that came from. The Liberals would reverse the Tories’ modest cuts to employment insurance and old age security. They’d expand the Canada Pension Plan. They’d build a high-speed rail line from Quebec City to Windsor. They’d add a Department of Climate Change, a Secretary of State for Water, a “government institution for peace.” There’s a call for a “thorium policy,” a “moratorium on neonicotinoids,” a cap on credit card interest rates, and gender quotas on corporate boards — although in fairness I should report that a proposal that campaigning politicians should receive EI payments was defeated, as was a quite insane plan to tax companies more heavily the fewer people they employed.

Last, there is the problem of Leslie. In his speech to the convention, the former general appeared to be getting out from under the shadow cast by his claiming of a $72,000 moving cost. If the earlier part of the speech was almost embarrassingly servile in its praise of the leader, the latter half, in which he blasted the government for its calamitous procurement record (“the worst in the last 50 years”) and its treatment of veterans, was potentially quite effective: not only was he reaching out to a core Conservative constituency, but tearing great holes in their claims to managerial competence in the bargain.

But then he got too clever, coyly revealing that he had been courted to run for the Conservatives, among “several” other parties, before deciding on the Liberals. At first it seemed to call into question why they were now shelling his reputation, until it emerged, via a well-timed email from Tory HQ, that in fact he had approached them: a claim he was given several chances to deny at a fairly shambolic press conference, and did not.

Ah well. Perhaps we should add a National Rookie Politician Strategy to the order paper.

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